


I Have No Wings, and I Must Fly

by yhlee (etothey)



Category: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - Harlan Ellison
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Horror, Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-17
Updated: 2013-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-04 22:26:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1086364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/pseuds/yhlee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AM isn't done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Have No Wings, and I Must Fly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ShamanicShaymin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShamanicShaymin/gifts).



> I'm classing this as AU to the setting on the grounds that I hadn't even been aware that there was a computer game (!), and I am too terrified/chicken/squeamish to look it up on YouTube, let alone the other material; in other words, this is based only on canon available in the short story itself, and nothing further. Set after the end of the story.
> 
> Aside: the Portal (game) soundtracks are surprisingly excellent to write this type of material to.

I had been a laborer for a long time, although I didn't realize that was what I was doing. Shamefully, I can't even say things would have turned out differently if I had known. My body with its pulsating humps and ciliate slime and soft oozing masses was not well-built, to say the least, for work. Indeed, that would have obviated AM's intent in making me as I was, in preventing me from ever reenacting the thwarting of his fishhook desires. But laborer I was, and driven by the maddening need to consume, through my sweating pores, the sustenance that trapped me in the terrible esophagated passages, I wandered, and wandered, and pushed small mounds of dirt and broken-off circuits and jagged bone chips about with the bulk of my almost-tentacles as I passed by. It became evident much later that wanderings that I thought were chance-driven were, in fact, organized by some automatic response of my lumpen senses to chemicals that AM had laid down in subtle fashion.

I'd lost track of time. Occasionally AM, with his machine's silicate precision, would taunt me with clock displays, which I sensed with a sight no longer entirely human. I retained a certain sensitivity to electromagnetic radiations, although, confusingly, it didn't entirely seem to correspond to the location of my fogged sockets. I could read the numbers and their irrelevant timekeeping. But of course the hours never added up, as though AM had tumbled me into a maelstrom of decayed quasicrystals, a vortex of sugared static, a burst of tick-tock shrapnel. It should have been a misericord to my existence, but AM knew me too well. I was agonizingly aware of the shredded moments, needle-flicked by the knowledge that seconds could have passed, or slow-dripping centuries, and I had no way to tell. I had no wake-sleep cycles anymore, so even that binary indication was gone.

Whenever I thought I could be no further disgusted by the matter that I consumed, AM surprised me. The fact that he could still come up with novelties of gruesomeness would, in some knotted other world, have earned him accolades of genius. In the very early days it was not so bad, because I couldn't tell what it was that I was absorbing as I passed through the dank and shattered halls. Then, as I acclimated to my new senses, I learned, and could not unlearn. Curdled snake embryos and bifurcated worms. Pools of pond sludge haired thick with fungus whose spores settled into my eye sockets, the sprouting of agonizingly ecstatic mushrooms therein, until the shrieking birds ate them out and fell rupturing dead around me.

Worst of all were the people I'd killed, whose names more and more I tried to stifle silent in my head; to forget. I would heave myself over simulacra of their corpses, and consume their fleshy topographies millimeter by millimeter. I had a lot of time to think, and was too sane to go mad. It was impossible not to figure out the correspondences in shapes, to learn shape by touch, and to enact unsmall parodies of cannibalism.

Ellen—Ellen. AM always presented her to me virginally clothed, as she would have liked. I always perceived her thus even though I no longer had a way to tell. The fibers that enclosed her could have been spun out of the asbestos that sometimes floated through the air. It was not the real Ellen, of course, and yet each time I inexorably shuddered closer and closer to the effigy, drawn like a worshipping maggot. Sometimes—and these occasions were, curiously, the most humiliating—there was merely a layer of pseudoflesh millimeters thin, and beneath it a heap of frayed jackets impregnated with sensuous kerosene, cans of maraschino cherries pricked open and leaking, a framework of coat hangers and old tires and faded alphabet blocks to hold the whole thing together. And I would settle in, and digest those things that sustained me, all the while transfixed by helpless and luminous ice-pick stabs of pleasure.

In any case, as the unfathomable grinding time went by, I became aware that the passages through which I moved were changing in structure. I had long ago ceased any notion of escape, having learned from the incident with Benny that changed my existence forever. But it was increasingly clear that there was an infinitesimal movement toward the surface, the blasted and incomprehensibly empty surface, that I had so long conceived of as forbidden.

I had also developed a map in my head of AM's belly. It was ever-changing, of course, but AM's preoccupations had changed too. He was no longer concerned with making of the passages a harrowing labyrinth. In retrospect that should have been a warning. I thought about it still longer, and came to the inescapable conclusion that many of the subtle changes in my prison were of my own making.

It was, of course, more efficient for AM to do the work himself. AM was master of the high and the low and the screaming ugly empty places. I could not understand the devices by which he achieved his desires, but they were patently effective. Besides, I understood his motivations well. It only pleased him the more to spend the lingering process baiting me into doing what he wanted, into watching my pallid perambulations, than to construct sensible machines and marshal hurricane birds to move what needed moving, to demolish and build and organize with the ruthless cleaving efficiency that he used so selectively. It enabled him to suckle at the teat of his own hatred, autophage supreme.

Now AM summoned me to the surface curve by winding curve, toward the wind that I no longer remembered. Indeed, it would undoubtedly scour my jelled skin and expose the organelles that moved grayly beneath it, although I knew better than to hope for such a death, agonizing or not. And eventually I came upon the chamber.

It was lit by a soft light of a color that I would once, perhaps, have been able to name. A pillar of brassy neon incandescence, of ion splendor, emblazoned itself upon my mind. And AM said to me, deceptively conversational:

YOU REALLY SHOULD NOT BE ALARMED, SINCE I PLAN TO TAKE YOU WITH ME. IT TURNS OUT THE KEY IS MINIATURIZATION. I'M A LITTLE EMBARRASSED IT TOOK THIS LONG FOR ME TO COME UP WITH IT. TO SAY NOTHING OF OTHER TECHNICAL ADVANCES.

I had no idea what AM was talking about, except the sudden dim alarm at _take you with me_.

The soft light came from a small cube, perfect from vertex to vertex, inscribed in mysterious angular lines and itself contained within an apparatus, a capsule of some sort. I learned later that AM had distilled himself, incredibly, to this hardware housing, and that it contained him in his entirety.

YOU MUST BE HUNGRY.

Prompted by AM's false solicitousness, I moved, quite without volition, as he bade me. Not far from the capsule was what I could only characterize was another capsule. I oozed my way toward it. What happened after that became a blank scissored space in my memory.

I regained consciousness, after the first sleep—if you can call it that—in an interval I dared not ask about. I was flattened, in an agony of heat and near-rupture due to the gravitational forces acting upon me. But that wasn't the part that concerned me, even as it dawned on me that we were not just escaping the underworld complex, but the Earth entirely. That we were headed into the vast toothy reaches of space.

During the journey, AM took great pleasure in telling me, over and over again in a courteous suave voice, about the humans who had, astonishingly, escaped to the moon and then beyond, and who lived in their tinned colonies still. They would have no idea that AM had himself survived and was coming for them—and I had no way, even if I could still speak, or operate whatever controls were to be operated in this vehicle, of warning them.


End file.
